Key Provisions of ‘Contract’ Stymie GOP

Only a week after their devastating defeat on the balanced-budget constitutional amendment, Republicans are facing the potential loss of two more priority items in their “contract with America”--a limit on congressional terms and a presidential line-item veto.

House Republican leaders have delayed for at least two weeks a vote on a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress, thus averting a near-certain defeat next week while buying more time to try to galvanize public support.

In the Senate, GOP leaders still cannot muster sufficient votes to adopt a House-passed line-item veto bill that grants presidents the unprecedented authority to kill single-line items in appropriations and tax bills.

And in a city where perception becomes reality, the seeming loss of legislative momentum by the Republican majority already has emboldened the Clinton Administration and Democrats in Congress, who are escalating their attacks against such GOP initiatives as legal reform and shifts or cuts in funding for school lunches and the arts--and even against House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) for alleged ethical violations.

President Clinton joined in Thursday by lunching on tacos in an elementary school cafeteria in northern Virginia to underscore his opposition to GOP plans to shift federal funding of school lunch programs to states.

With Republicans pressing their agenda for the first 100 days, the bumps in the road ahead also will test the leadership qualities of both Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.). And the fruits of their efforts to rescue the line-item veto and, perhaps, congressional term limits, may well influence the 1996 elections.

“Yes, they are losing a little momentum,” said Thomas E. Mann, a congressional scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington research organization. “That, plus the evidence that some of the budget cuts the Republicans are proposing may not fit well with the public are encouraging Democrats to step up their criticism of the contract.”

Republican leaders vigorously dispute such characterizations, saying that their program has not lost energy. They note that the House GOP contract promised to put the planks of its 10-point campaign manifesto to a vote within the first 100 days.

“We knew some of it would be tough,” said Rep. Robert S. Walker (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Republican Leadership Committee and a Gingrich lieutenant.

On the proposed balanced-budget constitutional amendment, which failed last week by one vote in the Senate, Dole has promised another vote. Walker called the defeat “a momentary setback.”

On the line-item veto, House GOP leaders privately are urging Dole to try to pass a weaker version of the bill in the Senate that would get some Republican backing but plenty of Democratic support. The measure then could be strengthened in a subsequent House-Senate conference committee to more closely resemble the House version.

On term limits, Republicans concede that they may only be able to win a majority vote--but that’s far short of the two-thirds margin required for passage of a proposed constitutional amendment. “We said it would be debated. We knew there was a very limited chance that it would pass,” Walker said Thursday in an interview.

Still, said Mann, “if these three major, structural changes all go down, they are setting themselves up for a fall. So there’s no question about the high stakes in all of this for the Republicans.”

That elements of the GOP contract are running into difficulty should not be surprising. Poll after poll has shown, for instance, that overwhelming public support for a balanced-budget amendment virtually evaporated when those polled were told that the Social Security Trust Fund might be used to help erase the deficit.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this week found that 64% of those questioned believe that Democrats did the right thing by blocking the amendment in the Senate.

On the other hand, congressional term limits are highly popular with the public--even if they are much less so among members of Congress. Too many lawmakers object to passing an amendment that would, in effect, end their careers.

Even among supporters of term limits, there is strong disagreement over what the limits should be. While most agree on a maximum of two terms for senators, competing proposals range from six years to 12 years for House members.

“Term limits is almost certain to be a defeat--it’s a long shot, in any case,” Mann said.

The line-item veto, which the House has approved, 294 to 134, presents a different problem for the GOP. Senate Republicans are split over two conflicting proposals.

One, by Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N. M.), would require a simple majority vote by just one house of Congress to block a line-item veto by a President. This proposal is believed to have broad Democratic support--and sufficient backing among Republicans--to pass.

But Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is fiercely promoting a competing proposal that would give a President greater power by allowing presidential rescissions to take effect automatically unless both houses approve a bill to block them. And if the President vetoes that legislation, it would take a two-thirds vote of both houses to override. It is this version that the House approved.

Most members of Congress say that McCain’s bill does not have a chance of passage in the Senate. McCain and backers of his version are the subjects of quiet persuasion to change their view. So far, McCain has refused to concede, calling the Domenici proposal “a sham” and vowing to fight it all the way.

“This is probably a case where the Republicans would be well advised to ensure victory by embracing Domenici’s bill, where Dole would be well-advised to try to pull this one out from the jaws of defeat,” Mann said. “I think it’s doable. The public isn’t going to look at what version of the line-item veto is approved.”